Posted
by
Unknown Lameron Tuesday October 18, 2011 @06:20PM
from the trust-us-we're-designers dept.

shaitand writes about Google disagreeing with the desire of Chrome users to put tabs under (rather than above) the location bar: "This issue has had overwhelming feedback from users with no notable dissent. But Google revealed their view on the community, saying that feedback and comments aren't considered, and today moved to silence dissent and lock comments on the issue. [A Chromium developer] says, 'Commenting on this bug has absolutely no effect at all on the likelihood that we are going to reconsider. So that people don't get their hopes up falsely, I'm locking this bug to additional comments.'"

If you have more than a handful of tabs, they belong on the side of the browser anyway. Chrome allows this. [lifehacker.com] Yeah, it doesn't change the fact that they're dicks, but it might help some people.

What dicks?They made a decision, and made it clear that it's not something they are going to do.

Being a dick they would have kept the thread alive, with no real intention of doing anything. Instead that made a design, and told their users; that is the right way to handle it, even if you wanted the feature.

Up until about 4 or 5 years ago, UIs of many of the major projects were designed and implemented by real programmers. These people made far more sensible trade-offs. They'd almost always choose practicality, productivity and usability over appearance. Now, this meant that there weren't as many rounded corners and gradients, but at least we had consistent UIs across applications, and they were reasonably efficient to use. We had proper menus, for instance, that made it very easy to see what an application could do.

As we all know, the situation has changed. Now we have a lot of failed web designers not being able to find work designing web sites, so instead they've tried to get involved with app development. This has not gone well. The UIs of programs like Firefox, and all of GNOME 3, have been trashed by these people. They've even had some impact on commercial software, like the horrid UIs that recent versions of MS Office and IE have.

We need to give these people the boot. It's one thing when they're making icons, but it's a completely different issue when they're deciding how the UI should be designed and implemented. None of them, across a wide range of software products, have been able to put together a usable UI. None of them.

There are entire degree programs on UI design. But a few users will demand that things be arranged the way they want. And for many things, the vocal minority gets a larger voice than the silent majority. Ignoring whining users isn't a bad thing. In fact, it shows a team dedicated to a unified UI vision that would be superior to UI by untrained users (you end up with the car from the Simpsons).

Speaking as a programmer, programmers are not designers. They should not, unless they have demonstrated an ability to do so, design UIs. Letting programmers design UIs is how we get software like emacs or vi: greatly productive for a small number of advanced users, completely unusable by almost any computer user apart from those.

I should mention that many users find Google's popup web previews on mouseover to be very obnoxious, and disable scripting just to avoid them, since Google does not provide an option to permanently disable them in search results.

Now, there's no way to avoid the popups without also making the cached search results inaccessible.

I 100% disagree with you. Emphatically. Having been in the CAD development world for 20+ years, programmers are THE LAST PEOPLE who should be designing user interfaces. The vast majority of programmers have no idea what usability means to a general audience, and even worse sense of aesthetic. The worst offenders are programmers who think they know better without ever having met a customer.

Now is an artless programmer better than a bad UI designer? That is debatable. But in my experience, the people who should develop the UI are the users and the trainers, together, and then provide a spec to the development team. With that feedback, even a mediocre programmer can make life a lot easier on the users.

I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but the programmers rarely have any idea how to actually use the software. Especially when it is a large modular project, and each programmer may only have a slight idea what the entire application actually does. Sure the lead integrator has a clue, but they are usually way too busy to put any thought into a UI design, let alone collect feedback from the people who use it; they often delegate to another tertiary programmer (intern, co-op) who knows even less.

I've seen this in 3D animation, CAD/CAM, medical software, automotive UI, factory and assembly line flow control, local government utilities control systems, etc.

I have always liked google and I still do, but their browser is not for me.

And to those saying fork chrome - better to fork Firefox I think. It's already pretty much feature-complete and just needs to be yanked out of the hands of Mozilla before they figure out how to screw it up like chrome.

Firefox: Hey, guys, we're adding in a ton of new features! I mean, tons of them! Look how much memory we're using with all this random bullshit a couple guys with hideously esoteric tastes kept bugging us to add in!Nerds: Waaaah! Waaaah! We don't want features! It's too bloated and wastes too much memory! Why do we have to dig into config files and about:config to change this? Make it different! It physically hurts us somehow! Waaaaaah! Waaaaaah!Chrome: Hey, guys, we're cutting out all this bullshit and not kowtowing to random esoteric features 1% of our userbase wants! Look how lean our browser is!Nerds: Waaaah! Waaaah! We want useless bullshit features! It's too nonconfigurable! Why don't we have to dig into config files and about:config to change this? Make it different! It physically hurts us somehow! Waaaaaah! Waaaaaah!

And this bitchfest right here has given me an entirely new appreciation for Firefox's and Google's devteams and some understanding of their arrogant attitudes if this is the sort of nonsense they have to deal with every day. Give the users an inch, they'll cry until you give them a mile, and then Chrome becomes just as bloated as Firefox just because a couple really loud nerds can't figure out how to install Opera.

Speaking as a Chrome user (and web developer), the ability to detach tabs is a critically important feature that I can't live without. The lack of said ability means that, when I need to view two tabs side-by side (often on different monitors), I have to open up a new browser and hope I can reproduce whatever was going on. It drives me nuts when I'm using a browser like IE, and am unable to do this. Even when I'm at home on my single monitor, and not working, I regularly tear off tabs and use the WIN+LEFT a

This may come as a surprise to you, but some people achieve less than divine perfection with their mouse input. As clicking on a tab is something people do often, it follows that clicking-and-accidentally-dragging a tab (by not releasing the mouse button as fast as you'd hoped) is a mistake that happens often. Making a product that annoys less dexterous users is almost as stupid as making a product that annoys less intelligent users.

Anyhow, who would you not offer an option for any UI behavior people are

But if you're dragging a tab and accidentally tear it off, you can simply move the mouse back into the tab bar and it reattaches itself. This is no more effort than it would have taken to drag the tab into the correct position without tearing off, since you'd probably need to move the mouse back there anyhow.

Compared to the thread on that bug, even the Firefox UI team's hostility to its userbase is but a pale imitation of Chrome.

But at least now we know where the Fx developers got the idea.

Really? I wasn't aware of the debate, and would have the tabs to go underneath the location bar. I would have dissented if I'd knows such a move was being discussed. That bit of the Chrome interface is just fine for me. In other words, they're not ignoring their userbase, they're ignoring a small but vocal subset of their userbase who have reported a valid design decision as a bug. The position of the tabs is not a bug, FFS. The bug report complains that "For myself I use a program called Stickies at work t

Unfortunately, while Firefox is customizable, the performance absolutely sucks. Just open one tab and go to some website that crashes Gecko, and the whole browser crashes. One tab is slow, the whole browser is slow. Too many tabs, and everything slows to a crawl, with long delays between typing into a textbox (like I'm doing now) and seeing the text show up.

My problem with FF is its still huge memory footprint. I can open up 4 tabs (a couple gMail accounts, Yahoo Groups, and Facebook) and before know it FF is consuming 450MB and climbing. That's insane for even dozens of web-pages at once. And I'm talking the latest FF.

Actually, you're mixing two things. Threads are supposed to have better performance, due to less cost when doing a context switch, but if the process crashes, everything goes. But performance and stability are two different things.

And nowadays I believe flash and things like that are run on another process, so it is less likely to crash... And having a process for each tab would require a full code rewrite, and I really don't believe it's worth it.

These problems all exist because Firefox stubbornly clings to the antiquated and idiotic notion of having all tabs and windows run in a single process. [snip] When is Firefox going to stop wasting time on useless UI changes and actually fix their architecture?

I think "stubbornly clings" is not supported by our actions. The multiprocess Firefox project is called Electrolysis. It's been going on for about two years now. We moved plugins to a separate process back in Firefox 3.6.4, in June 2010; that was part of the project. Firefox for Android uses two processes, to improve UI performance. Bringing multiprocess Firefox to the desktop is a priority, but it's hard.

We're working on it, but it's a false dichotomy to suggest that we need to choose between improving our UI and improving our architecture. Indeed, if we choose one over the other, we lose. We have to do both.

This issue has had overwhelming feedback from users with no notable dissent. But Google revealed their view on the community, saying that feedback and comments aren't considered, and today moved to silence dissent and lock comments on the issue.

This is what I don't like about Google, above all else. This is utterly contemptible behaviour and quite often why I find myself swearing at them as I try to find a work-around.

If you are willing to trade speed and stability for greater customizability, there is always Firefox. Feature creep is what defines FF, so if Google doesn't want their browser to turn into a huge complicated mess, all I can do is agree with them.

And for the record, I'm a Firefox user. As a developer, I would not want to live without Firebug and 3 dozen more add-ons. Chrome is a "consumer" browser, much like Safari and Opera, and there is nothing wrong with that.

You act like Firefox is slow, the only times I have a problem with speed is when my internet connection stalls out, and that happens with other browsers as well. Even my laptop with dual core 1.6ghz processor I don't have any trouble with Firefox keeping up.

And this is why it's important to have several browsers around that all implement the same standards. This kind of competition is awesome, because a new browser is just a click away. Don't like Chrome? Go for IE or Firefox. Or the other half-dozen options that are available. Features that drive people away will either be killed, or result in the death of the browser.

I really hope that three browsers will remain at the top of the heap for a long time. That makes it a lot harder for one to dictate how the web

How is this that contemptible? It's not immoral, unethical, or even evil. It's a painter saying no I like my painting with purple grass, and I don't care that you want green grass in my painting because it's my painting. If you want green grass go to that Van Gogh guy.
This isn't really a "bug" ether. It's an aesthetics request. It is behaving exactly as the designer wanted it to.

I'm sorry, but a browser is not a piece of art.It's like your carpenter telling you that your cabinet will have sliding doors; no matter how many orders he gets for hinged doors, he'll ignore it.Sure, he can do that, but he'll be considered a quirky craftsman at best, and a bad one at worst, and I don't think his carpentry business will be viable in the long run.

It's not like that at all. Hiring a carpenter would be analogous to hiring a developer to write a custom web browser for you. If that were the case, then yes, customers would have reason to gripe. But Google's response is more like a cabinet manufacturer that offers its wares on the open market (a la Lowe's, Home Depot, etc.). Customers can gripe all they want, but if it's not a bespoke job then you have to choose from what's available.

Even in a free market economy, consumer choice among vendors is limited to those vendors who choose to enter the market.

It's a usability request. There are a number of situations, such as via a terminal server, where there is a screen element at the top of the screen. It also means moving the mouse further every time you switch tabs.

This isn't evil per say. As you say, it is their design and their browser. But it is also pitched as being open and in the open source world it is a big deal (whether you are for or against) if a project is or is not community driven. A direct statement that community feedback isn't a considerati

And remember, those who commented were those who looked up a bug report about the tabs being under the location bar. Users who were happy with the way things are would never have seen the discussion, so it was hardly likely to be a representative selection of users.

It's a sad day when basic UI customizability is referred to as "bloatware" - on Slashdot of all places. I remember back in teh days when Firefox (then Firebird) appeared, "bloatware" was having an email client in your browser.

I can't help but think that Apple has truly 'advanced' the industry in a very short term.

Google claims to be trying to build a community around Chrome as an open project. People who might consider joining that community have a right to know that this not only isn't a community driven project but that community feedback is openly ignored in the development process.

This is information spreading and not whining. People have the right to know about something like this so they can make an informed decision about whether to

It wasn't ignored, it was considered and turned down. The they told people about ti so they wouldn't be strung along.It's a very professional way to handle it. most companies would have strung people along.

Google is free to do what they want. And I am free not to participate in their community and share their openly expressed views with others so they can make an informed choice on whether to do the same.

The more I read about Chrome's design process the more I hear, "it's the Google way or no way at all". I don't have a problem with the tabs being on the top, but it seems like it would be very easy to have an option where you want the tab bar. Several of the comments had valid use cases for why you'd want tabs under, but Google isn't interested in adding it as an option?

It's not so easy to do so. You're adding a ton of complexity with these kinds of things, because not only are you cluttering the options page with tiny little toggles, but you're causing a ton of extra code to try to handle the tab bar being in a different place, and you're breaking a whole bunch of assumptions all over the place (be it in code or themes) about where the tab bar is, what it is expected to look like, etc.

For example, Google has been working on an option for quite some time to move the tab ba

Seriously, I'm not trying to be a dick here, but why in this world does this merit being front page? I find this to be on the level of simple bickering. This is more suited for a forum post or something a long that line.

Generally, the less you have to move the mouse, the better. If the tabs are between the text and URL bar, you save 60ish pixels of movement compared to Chrome's arrangement every time you touch a tab, which tends to be a lot. On the other hand, you type into the URL bar at least an order of magnitude less often.

There are other misfeatures that Firefox copied from Chrome, but fortunately all of them can be reverted as an option. Chrome lacks that configurability.

Generally, the less you have to move the mouse, the better. If the tabs are between the text and URL bar, you save 60ish pixels of movement compared to Chrome's arrangement every time you touch a tab, which tends to be a lot. On the other hand, you type into the URL bar at least an order of magnitude less often.

Yes, but you gain on the infinite height of a tab ending at the top of the screen. By having tabs on top with the window maximized, you have to only aim in the X axis and move the cursor up, instead of having to aim at a small area in XY, which is demonstrably harder and more time consuming.

Yes, but you gain on the infinite height of a tab ending at the top of the screen.

Only when the window is maximized, and you aren't running OSX...

you have to only aim in the X axis and move the cursor up, instead of having to aim at a small area in XY, which is demonstrably harder and more time consuming.

Even chrome maximized on windows... the top pixel or two aren't part of the tab, so you have to bring it back down a couple pixels. The amount of effort between that, and moving it down enough to get into t

I'm guessing that maybe, just maybe, Google might have a little better statistics on the browsing tendencies of users than you.

By your logic, we should put the tabs right in the middle of the screen. After all, the user's mouse tends to be nearer the center of the screen rather than at the top, and the less mouse movement the better.

The reason why tabs are above the address bar is that it plainly makes more sense.

Consider dialogs with tabbed pages in any OS/DE that you've seen - Windows, OS X, KDE, Gnome, they're all the same. Any widgets inside the tabbed pages control are those that "belong" to the currently selected page. Pages may duplicate widgets, but then the currently displayed widgets represents parameters that are in effect for that particular page. Any widgets outside the tabbed pages control are those that don't belong to a

The opposite is true. If you put the tabs at the top of the screen, the user can just jerk his mouse upwards, and the top of the screen will limit movement, making it quicker/easier to get to the tab bar. If you put the tabs below the address bar, now you need a precise movement to get there. Either you're going to overshoot it and move the mouse back down, or you're going to move the mouse slower to get the precision to stop there.

Commenting on this bug has absolutely no effect at all on the likelihood that we are going to reconsider. So that people don't get their hopes up falsely, I'm locking this bug to additional comments.'"

i call these people assholes. because, thats the term used for that kind of behavior.

anyway this assholery has just persuaded me not to use chrome ever. and i had some complains with firefox too.

I would much rather they work on more outstanding bugs (not that this is even a bug--it really is working as intended) than spend time and effort on something as trivial as this. I prefer tabs on top, but my browser of choice (Safari on OS X, though I use Chrome elsewhere) doesn't do it that way. Would I like them to change it? Yes, but it won't happen. Apple briefly tried it with the Safari 4 beta, and reverted it back. Oh well.

In Safari, I'm much more happy with new features like Reading List, Reader

on that specific bug tracker thread. Just because 99% of the people replying in THAT thread doesn't mean that 99% of all chrome users support that position.

Personally, I love the tabs being on top because that is where I think they belong. Everything under the tab belongs under the tab. The address bar, navigation buttons, print button, actual web page, and everything else belongs to that specific page and should be under a tab. If the tabs are on the bottom then the tab's container holds the address bar, navigation buttons, print button and everything EXCEPT the actual web page. Silly.

Tabs belong on the top. Now, I wouldn't care if google made an option to allow the user to move the tabs to the bottom.

But to whine about google's "arrogance" by not doing what you want them to do shows real arrogance.

At the risk of sounding like a tool...
Wow, so many people demanding the UI be changed just because they're used to of being a different way in another browser...
I can appreciate the remote desktop argument & such but seriously... first world problem much??
It's a free browser - if you don't like it, stop complaining so much and use what you're used to...

I use Firefox, but I actually prefer the tabs above the address field. A tab is just a container and the address field contains information that's directly associated with the other content within the tab. The same goes for the back and forward buttons; their state is dependent on the browsing history of a specific tab.

Still... giving people the option to switch shouldn't be something that's denied with a heavy fist. That's just poor PR.

So what? This is non-news. Chromium is open source. Chrome is a closed source build of Chromium. Google can do anything it wants with Chrome, and I see no problem with that. If you want to have tabs below the location bar, great! Write a patch to Chromium, or quit whining. The point of free software is that the user is free to change the software in any way that she sees fit.

I know of a similar large company that likes to do things a particular way, and it's *never* described as "being respected for having a vision and going for it", in fact it's almost universally reviled.

Issues like this are stupid. Projects ought to adhere to design principles. There is a clear rationale for why the tabs are on top and not below the address bar; chrome developers made this design choice deliberately since the very beginning. The same goes with other aspects of chrome's design.

I can understand that if chrome is not a suitable browser for your personal use, that you would prefer to use a different browser instead, but what I don't understand is why all the bitterness and hostility? That'

This issue is a perfect example of the gap between Apple and Droid. You people are flaming each other about a fairly small usability feature. This is right up there with complaining about not being able to change icons. This is why Droid is a mess right now (from bugs, to security, to low customer satisfaction) and iOS is dominating. I know giving up software flexibility is the worst sin ever, but sometimes you need to just except small things you can't change (like the size of your caps lock key or the

One more note here for the benefit of Slashdot (hi!) and anyone else who's not clear on this issue or how our bug tracker works.

We made the decision not to make this configurable long, long ago, even before we WontFixed this bug in comment 59 (over a year ago itself). Accordingly the bug is closed because that reflects not only our current stance but the position we've had for a very long time.

This does not mean either that we will never listen to user feedback, or that we used to be listening on this bug but decided to stop. The issue is that our bug tracker is specifically about tracking what we consider to be bugs, not a general forum for feedback and debate on our design decisions. That means that in general (this bug included), we can and will decide not to address particular requests, and when we do, commenting on the closed bug is not going to make us change our minds. On the contrary, we will not hesitate to lock things down in the bug tracker precisely to prevent things from spiraling out of control or misleading people into sharing their feedback here instead of where it's helpful

We have other venues such as the chromium-discuss mailing list and our feedback forums where it is appropriate to share your opinions. The forums are a place where we are set up to track user feedback and surface the most critical issues to the team without impacting the productivity of us developers who are busy trying to make Chrome work better.

We don't promise we'll change our minds, but we're not hostile to you expressing your point of view. This is just not the correct forum to do so.

They've no interest in giving users the browser that they, the users, want.

It's a fair point, but then again, they have already given users the browser they want.

When I switched to Chrome, I wasn't pestering Google Devs to gimme gimme gimme. They had an idea, manifested it, and now we have a more competitive browser market. They even poured some advertising money into it so that John and Jane Doe might actually realize how much of the internet they've been missing by using older versions of IE.

It's their browser, their agenda, their rules. If it wasn't for the developers of Chro

WARNING These experimental features may change, break, or disappear at any time. We make absolutely no guarantees about what may happen if you turn one of these experiments on, and your browser may even spontaneously combust. Jokes aside, your browser may delete all your data, or your security and privacy could be compromised in unexpected ways. Any experiments you enable will be enabled for all users of this browser. Please proceed with caution.

Also, "no dissent"? Tabs on top of the address bar makes way more sense than having them underneath. I mean, duh: the address bar's contents are dependent on the tab. Why would the tabs be underneath, other than "Mozilla Firebird 0.2 did it that way so now everyone has to do that forever!"

two random reasons why "tabs at the top" is a bad idea:

- placing stuff at the top of the screen is a bad idea, because that area of the screen is often covered by other stuff (like e.g. the menus of a RDP session) or is in an area which makes menus pop up if you go near there with the mouse

- tabs should be close to the web page you are looking at, because tabs are used OFTEN, definitely more than bookmarks, so they should be easier to reach with the mouse. Why would you want to place the tabs as far away as

It sounds like you are seriously over thinking the "meaning" of the positioning. There are things like terminal windows that put something in that location of the screen and it is further from where your mouse hovers on the content. That is more than enough justification for having AN OPTION to reposition the bar.

I immediately edited the Wikipedia article on Chrome to include this outrageous controversy, but my edit was reverted by deletionist fanbois who insist on removing any material that offends them! Can you believe it!?!?

Do you think Google doesn't know that? How can you read the summary and think that that's Google's official reason for closing the thread? That was commentary in the slashdot summary. The point was not to silence the dissent, but to say "we made a decision. And it's final, so don't try to convince us to change our minds." Have you ever looked in the Chrome options/preferences menus? They are so simple. The decision was probably made to keep them simple. Having another option would also add bloat to a very s

You might not care but Google certainly cares. If the browser doesn't gain enough market share it is useless to them.

"They are releasing a free browser and saying they don't want to change the way it looks."

No they are releasing a project as open and claiming they want to build a community around it. Now they are saying that the feedback from that community isn't considered at any level. This has little to do with the feature in question and everything to d